


turn the tide

by papyrocrat



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:49:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papyrocrat/pseuds/papyrocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S1 missing moments with Alpha</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn the tide

**Author's Note:**

> content note: explicit sex, any and all Alpha-related weirdness

Alpha runs.He has no words for _rain_ or _dark_ , or maybe he has too many, but he knows he is wet like in the shower, and his eyes are not their best.The plastic in the shirt he tore off of Sierra clanks as his feet bruise the ground.

A group of men come towards him, and they don’t look very nice.There are four of them, but he know she is more man than any of them – more men than all of them – and the air goes red, until they are all sleeping.

Alpha sorts through their clothes for their wallets, even though he doesn’t know why the soggy rectangles are important.

Then the world flashes blue.There are other people there and they are yelling.It isn’t nice when people yell.

And so Alpha runs.

*

Echo steps off the treadmill.

“It’s not going to happen again!” Topher shouts, and Echo frowns.Topher doesn’t shout.“And if it does-“

“ _When_ it does,” Mr.Dominic interrupts him.It isn’t nice when people interrupt.Echo looks around for Boyd.Boyd will help.“I’d like to keep the casualties to a minimum.”He stops and looks at Topher.“Of course, I’ve made my peace with the reality of acceptable losses.”

“If anything like that happens again, I’d prefer to have my face torn apart by one of these, please,” Dr. Saunders brushes her hand along the stick in Mr. Dominic’s arms.“Echo, it’s time for your appointment.”

Echo goes off with Dr. Saunders.Dr. Saunders is nice.

*

Alpha meets her in the bar.

She’s not perfect like Echo, or acceptable except for her beautiful damage like Whiskey, but she’s dark and beautiful and from behind her he can pretend.So Bobby slips into the stool next to hers holding a Johnny Walker and a vodka cranberry and tells him that he ain’t from around here, but the girls where he’s from aren’t near as pretty as she is.She accepts the drink and the compliment a little too gratefully, and he smiles.

Alpha considers inviting her back to his place, but he shares it with like, fifty other guys, and you know they never put the seat down like they should when a lady is around. They sway the two blocks back to her dingy studio apartment.She pours him a mincing finger of Tennessee’s best and only looks down at her watch once before he slams her up against the wall and kisses her roughly.

He makes the mistake of opening his eyes when he squeezes her bare, sharp shoulderblades to steer them towards the bed.

He can only pretend from behind her.

So he turns her around and throws her torso against her mattress, her face instinctively buried against her left elbow.His palms sing with every slap, and her squeals twist pain with pleasure with anticipation until they both shudder silently. 

He closes his eyes and leans his head back as Echo’s hair and voice and warm skin bounce through his brain, and doesn’t stop the girl as she crawls away.

She smiles up at him, trusting and sated, and curls up to sleep like a cat.Like she’s willing to be even less than a mere human, unashamedly, right there in front of him, just to give him something even he can’t understand.His hands itch and his blade sears through his pockets.

But Special Agent Cassidy reminds Bobby that they left the bar with her in front of a half a dozen witnesses, and they don’t need that kind of trouble.He palms a bottle of nail polish in Echo’s favorite shade of green, and leaves her vulnerable and unconscious.

*

He wakes up tied to a chair, to the sound of screaming.

“Hey there, man-friend,” says the fair stranger leaning over him.“Thought you were never going to wake up.It’s why I helped.”The freak chuckles.“Friends help each other out.”The knife slashes his other bicep, and Chris realizes that first scream was his.“That looks oucherrific, there, amigo.”Chris pulls back, yanks those useless muscles he’s so proud of, but he’s strapped tightly into a dentist chair of doom.

“Maybe you could stop, with the pissing and the screaming and the perspiring?” the man asks.“I mean, I know they’re physiological responses and you really can’t, but it’d be muchas graciated, because, you know, it’s all a little gross.”A squeamish kidnap-torturer, Chris thinks, just his luck.

“I think I’m going to have some candy.”The man rummages through his toolkit, and pulls out a handful of lollipops.“It’s just like, where to start?Not with a red.I love the orange ones.They’re like round little Sunny-Ds.Man, I could use a Sunny-D right now.”The man twists the left side of his face into his shoulder, and for a tense, bizarre moment Chris considers begging; an appeal to common humanity.

The moment ends when the man leans over him, all mischief and cold blue eyes.“You know what are great?Brains.”Chris fights the urge to scream as the man traces the knife around his face, threatening to show his appreciation with a teasing pressure against his temple.“Brains don’t get all over your good furniture at the slightest provocation.”

Slightest provocation.Chris starts to scoff, but the fist holding a lollipop bouquet slams down on his cheek, and he sags back into the chair.“See?A completely muss-less fuss.”His torturer smiles guilelessly.“You know, you’ve been a pal.You can have a red one,” and a candy slides into Chris’s mouth.He reflexively takes a suck, and the lollipop snaps out, and so do two of his teeth.“Maybe I do like the red ones.I just can’t make up my mind.”For some reason the man thinks his own indecision is a delicious joke, one that makes him sway his shoulders playfully between the hand with the lollipops and the one with the knife.

“What’s your name, oh new bro-guy’o-mine?”Chris bites his swollen lip.It’s a small act of defiance for which he’s sure he’ll pay, but the man just laughs. “Richard!That’s perfect.But to me, you’ll always be Dick.Which you should consider a tribute to your obvious manliness, and not at all as commentary on your charming personality.Dick.”

The chair lights up, and Chris strains desperately one more time.“I need you to run a little pop quiz for me, pal.”Chris sinks towards the light.“Cheer up, Dick!You’re about to be your best.”

*

“It was an isolated incident!An anomaly, on which you are harping, which is not healthy.It makes your occipital lobe all….floopy.”

“Topher, you are not speaking to the security staff,” Adelle snaps, and Dom’s face doesn’t even register the insult.“Leaving aside the impossibility of occipital….floopiness,” - oh, that makes him sneer, as if _he_ could find an occipital lobe with a “Pretentious Studsware Sale HERE” sign flashing over it - “you cannot properly claim the singularity of an event unless you have at least attempted to re-create it.As you well know.”

Topher grasps both sides of his unbuttoned-down and crosses his arms over his head. “You’re talking about making another Alpha.On purpose.”He glares through his plaid tent.“Didn’t that turn out catastrophically badly the first time?Isn’t there some official policy about, you know, avoiding in-house massacres when possible?Because if not, it might be time to update the manual.”

“In case you succeed, Mr. Dominic will be on hand to ensure fallout is minimal.”

He flings his arms wide to see her not just calm, but actually giving a small smile.“Victor is booked tonight.Please take Kilo and see what you can do.”

“You’re going to make me make Kilo into an Alpha, which will make Dom kill Kilo?”

“There won’t be a lot of making on my end,” Dom interjects. “I can pretty much do the killing all on my own.”

“Well, what if she gets to me first?”Dom shrugs.“Fine, then, what if she gets to you first, and we’re risking the whole Dollhouse?Again.”

“We take risks for science all the time, Topher,” Adelle tells him calmly.

“Yeah, risks with rats!And assassins!And grant money!I can make you a really expensive killer rat, that’d be okay!Or exploding labs, which everyone secretly wants anyway!But we don’t experiment on –“

“People you know?People you don’t wish to know?”She pauses.“You, Topher, experiment on people every day.Leaving a permanent imprint gong six months without any kind of diagnostic, which as you know pushes the bounds of accepted protocol, that’s not an experiment?”

“This isn’t about Sanders!This is about not needing any more Saunderses!”he yells.

“Precisely.We are the only people looking for Alpha.We must understand as much as we can.”

*

“I thought I was the only one after the Dollhouse” Paul slides the tape in and out of its envelope, as if he’s deciding whether or not to have seen Caroline.

Mellie’s not sure she believes his theory that Tanaka, Darren, and everyone else up to J. Edgar Hoover are clients of the Dollhouse and that’s why he’s not getting anywhere, but he’s been so brave.She’s glad he has help.

Well.Help he appreciates.

“Who do you think sent it?” She bites her lip, she’s just blurted out the obvious, but Paul tips his chin down and purses his lips.

“Haven’t the faintest,” he admits. “I’m gonna find them, though.”

*

Alpha skulks in Keplar’s backyard.

Two of his personalities vie to be the overachiever spitting out the joke about the things that go bump in the night, but Alpha laughs. As if one lord, with his high and freakin’ mighty attitude towards the things that go bump the other fifteen hours a day, can suddenly expected to jump in and protect everyone in the world from all sorts of ghosties and ghoulies?

Of course, it’s not about ghosties and ghoulies.It’s about showtime. The Thai delivery guy has just pulled in twenty minutes early, and Alpha is nothing if not punctual for these dates with himself.

So he runs.

 


End file.
